Grammatical and Lexical Dialectal Variation in Spanish: the Case of «deísmo»

Abstract

ABSTRACT: «Deísmo» is a non-standard dialectal phenomenon consisting of the insertion of a non-required preposition «de» ‘of’ before a non-finite clause: «Me apetece (de) salir» ‘I want to go out’. In most papers, «de» is analyzed as a defective complementizer that does not change the meaning of the sentence. However, «deísmo» has also been associated with a prospective meaning with some verbs, and «de» has been considered as a marker of evidentiality with visual perception verbs. In this paper, we provide a formal analysis for «deísmo» constructions, in which «de» is located in a projection below that occupied by «de» in «dequeísmo» constructions). Secondly, we will show the results of a questionnaire whose objective is to figure out if there is an evidential meaning associated with «deísmo». For the questionnaire, we made a preliminary search in Corpus Oral y Sonoro del Español Rural (COSER) and in Spanish Web Corpus 2018 (Sketch Engine). From this, we selected the most frequent verbs with «deísmo» in Castilla-La Mancha (Spain). An examination of the results revealed that, on the one hand, «deísmo» is lexically associated with certain verbs, but not necessarily with all of the same semantic class; and on the other hand, that there is not an evidential meaning associated with «deísmo».